Hamilton opens up about his technical impact on Ferrari

Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton has reckoned that he has been in a continuous back-and-forth with Ferrari’s engineers over car setup decisions, revealing that he has pushed the Scuderia for more experimentation work than the Italian outfit has been used to.

Lewis Hamilton announced his shock exit from Mercedes last February. While the announcement came ahead of the 2024 F1 season, the British driver completed the season with the Brackley-based outfit.

The seven-time F1 champion has since joined Ferrari, and he has already completed the opening ten races of the 2025 F1 season. Although he secured pole position for the Shanghai F1 Sprint which he went on to win in a dominant fashion, he has struggled for one-lap pace since.

Explaining his integration in the environment of Ferrari which is very different from what he experienced at Mercedes, Hamilton has revealed that he has been in a continuous back-and-forth with the Scuderia’s engineers over car setup decisions, reckoning that he has pushed the the Italian team for more experimentation work.

“I’m just trying to… We’ve not had any upgrades or anything like that so it’s the same car for quite some time now with the same package each weekend.”

“I’m just challenging the guys and constantly battling the engineers, asking questions of it. They set things up, and are like ‘this is how we always do it’.

“And I’m like, ‘well, what about this?’ And we work on trying things, and bit by bit, we are making progress," Hamilton added.

Although Ferrari has displayed an encouraging long-run pace in most of the races since the start of the season, the Scuderia has struggled for one-lap qualifying performance which has often deprived Hamilton and his team-mate Charles Leclerc of fighting for top places at the sharp end of the field.

Pressed on to reveal what he thinks Ferrari need to do in order to get into a position in which they can battle with the field-leading McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull outfit, Hamilton gave a clear answer.

“We’ve improved in our qualifying from Monaco onwards, which is positive, but ultimately we need upgrades. We need an upgrade to be able to fight the guys up front.”

“It’s my first half of the year in a new team. It’s interesting to see how different teams work and operate. There’s been times in my career where you’ve had a whole bunch of upgrades very, very early on in the season and you plough ahead very early, then you stop and taper off.”

“And, you know, here, it’s also the last year of this generation of cars and harder to find performance.”

Signing off with a word for his expectation for the all-new technical regulations that will come into effect in 2026, Hamilton noted: “The fact is, with this car hopefully we can still fight for a second in the Constructors’, that would be great. But I want a car that can win next year, so that’s priority.”